The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
One advantage of cloud computing environments is that users and developers have tools to enable the creation and utilization of services in a condensed period of time. As the infrastructures for users to run their workloads in cloud environments continue to grow, identity management tools and services may also play an important role in cloud environment security and administration.